Should I Automate My Twitter Marketing?

The never ending question every business and every person have – should I automate my Twitter marketing and if yes, then how much should I automate it? The question that separated marketers into two different camps. But is this the real question we should ask? Shouldn’t we better ask how Twitter automation COULD be implemented into your marketing campaign and not whether it should be used at all? Because everyone is using automation at some point. It only depends on how aggressive you are willing to go. It’s all about strategy, creativity and experimentation.

Social Media is growing rapidly and brands want to be everywhere. Large companies are able to hire entire teams that focus only on Social Media. But small business or individuals don’t have this kind of luxury and many things need to be done on their own. A strict and busy work schedule leaves only a very small time windows for working with social media. That’s when automating some parts of your marketing campaign could come in handy. Even large companies are automating some processes, so they could concentrate on more important tasks.

The biggest doubt when deciding if you should choose Twitter automation is – personalization. Many marketers claim that you are losing human interaction with your audience that way. But who told you that you won’t be able to communicate with your audience personally? Unless you have super advanced AI software that could mimic human behavior and make decisions on its own, human interaction will always be needed in any kind of marketing. It’s just up to you how personalized you want your Twitter marketing to be.

For example, most marketers cannot imagine their life without scheduled tweets. None of us have time to connect every 1 or 2 hours in order to post a new tweet. Instead, we can create a schedule for few days in advance and don’t worry that we might forget to post something new every hour. However, it is impossible to schedule every tweet. Replying to questions, retweeting time-sensitive information and similar activities could not be automated. Well, technically it could. But imagine how attractive it would be to see the same answer to every tweet? That’s when automation interlace with human interaction. Either you reply to every tweet by yourself or you do not reply at all. It’s your decision. But my advice would be to choose the first option.

Another huge dilemma is automating Twitter direct messages. No secret that most marketers are against it. But is it really such bad practice? Recently, I read an interesting article from Jonathan Gebauer about how he is automating DMs. According to his article, the question is not whether you should use it, but how you should use it. It is all up to your creativity. Create an attractive, funny and engaging message and you will see that many people actually respond to your automated DMs. Don’t just jump in and send promotional messages. Better start with a question or a joke and wait for recipient to respond. And, only after you receive a response you can start promoting your product or develop a longer conversation. It is clear that you cannot automate a full conversation, but this technique could be a great tool for starting it.
Imagine that you have loads of new followers every day. It may take hours to write a message by yourself to each of them. And the fact is that even then only a small part will respond to it. Why you should waste you precious time when you can just simply automate this step.

Each situation is different. And different situations require different measures. I am not defending either side and I’m definitely not saying that you should do this instead of that. It is always up to you and your marketing team to decide which approach you are willing to take. The thing is that there will always be a point when you’ll have to choose between hiring a new person to cope with growing social media tasks or just automating some parts in order to be able to focus on other activities.

As I like to say, there’s no better way to prove something without trying to do it by yourself. I have read many articles about Twitter automation. One part states that there is no way you can benefit from Twitter automation and that you can only ruin your social media marketing campaign. Others claim that they reached a very decent results by almost fully automating their Twitter accounts. So, I decided to start my own experiment and test if it is possible to benefit from such Twitter strategy. I will try to use every well-known technique to develop a totally new Twitter account. My goal is to minimize time spent on Twitter as much as possible. For the next few months I will be writing series of articles about how this experiment is working for me. Hope you will find it interesting and useful.